terms

Badland

This week in London, insurance company Beagle Street decided to "Release the Pounds" in a publicity stunt to promote the finding of its latest survey. £5000 worth of beautiful origami dogs were dispersed across the capital for all and sundry to discover.

Remember firemeetsdesire in 2008? No? Then perhaps you recall Piers Morgan doing his best Burt Reynolds stretching out nude on a fur selling firemeetsdesire in 2009? Okay, fine, it's all brand new to you, so here's the deal; Burger King Japan are making a 'Flame-Grilled' fragrance, for reals, including the seductive perfume ads to go with it.

Here's one for the spoof badland department, this large poster installed in the Sydney suburb of Chippendale was created by graphic designer Michael Agzarian under the political activist group Abbottsolutelynot.com. It spoofs Obama's famous "Hope" poster, but labels Abbott as "Hopeless". As the site says, "our poster depicts the grim situation Australia finds itself in with Tony Abbott as Prime Minister leading an equally inept and uncaring ministry.”

London artist Nick Smith has made several pieces of Pantone pixel art recreating famous works of art which is on exhibit at Lawrence Alkin Gallery until Feb 21st. Naturally the cool looking pixel art of fine art images have spread around the web as we're all suckers for this sort of thing.

PETA; true to their tasteless sexist form decided to erect a billboard in Nottingham protesting milk. “Some bodily fluids are bad for you. Don't swallow. Ditch Dairy.” the line read, next to an image of a woman whose face and hair had chunks of white stuff sprayed all over it. Yes, it looks like bukkake, and considering the cheeky line, that was the point.

You remember the "real life like buttons that Coca Cola used in their amusement park back in 2010? A very simple idea, user data in IDF bracelets, allowed teens to "like" things as they enjoyed the park, and it updated their facebook in realtime. The park itself enjoyed the ability to brag about the most "liked" rides and the extended social media outreach gossiping teens provided.

When the giant hot pink condom in Sydney was put on a landmark in Sydney last week, we had a severe sense of Deja Vu. The Aids Council of New South Wales (Acon) created the “I’m ON” campaign to encourage safe sex among gay men, but it's not the first time we've seen giant pink condoms raising Aids awareness.

Firebox the jokey site that sells risqué sillyness like the Stress Mushrooms has been slapped on the wrist by the ASA for displaying "the UNT mug" prominently on their page. The UNT mug has, according to descriptions, excellent beverage serving abilities, oddly familiar selection of letters and a C-shaped handle. That's the funny.

This Badlander is fun! Creatives René Schultz and Casper Christensen wanted to get their portfolio in front of creative directors, who are notoriously hard to get an appointment with. They decided to disguise their portfolio as Lürzer's Archive magazine, containing all of their work, QR codes leading to online videos and even fake interview articles with themselves.

Sleepy Hollow was promoting it's release to DVD and the shows new season with a hashtaggged "#HeadlessDay" promotion... which happened to be mailed out just as the news about the Steven Sotloff’s death reached the world. The campaign consists of meme-jokes with the tagline "Happy Headless Day from Sleepy Hollow" and the timing is terrible. The idea was that people could share the memes on social media and tag them #HeadlessDay - yikes.

ThinkJam who created the campaign immediately issued an apology and pulled the campaign from running now.

A while back, Swedish Creative (Art) Director Kenneth Pilo of Pilo Bold Me showed off his case study of the long-running catfood campaign to save the tigers he helped create in Sweden. The brand Lantmännen Doggy & Tetra Pak donated a chunk of the income from you buying their cat food to help save the tigers via the WWF. But better still, cats could become a tigers sponsor, adopting a tiger and promising to donate to them every month.

Listen up, brands and social media people, there's one idea so over-used in advertising today that it has its own tumblr Badland site. You see, Your Selfie Idea is Not Original, and that selfie idea is trotted out at least once a day in the ad-world, and no matter what brand signs off on it, the campaign is rubbish. Well, apart from that Samsung underwater selfie stunt, because that was a pretty cool product benefit demonstration.

AirBnB launched a new design today, complete with a new logo. The "Bélo" logo, which it's called internally, is an upper-case A, but people are already snickering about it looking like labia or a scrotum. To make matters worse (funnier?) AirBnB invite you to draw your own symbol with the design toolkit. Let the lewd illustration competition begin. The tagline? "Belong Anywhere." Twitter is tittering about the logo and cracking jokes all day long, Buzzfeed got to make yet another list, and everyone is sending twitpics of the logo around.